Gratitude May Be The Key To Addiction Recovery

This can foster even greater feelings of gratitude for yourself and for other people. Serving others is also a beneficial way to support your long-term addiction recovery. Relationships often suffer because of addiction, but gratitude is a tool that can help you strengthen old bonds and also create new ones.

The Importance of Gratitude in Recovery

Drug addiction and alcoholism are not a choice, they are in fact diseases. Let Right Path Treatment Centers treat you with compassion.

Learning to appreciate those suffering from addiction around you can help you cultivate an air of gratitude. If you’re wondering how to be grateful during addiction recovery, just think about the wonderful people around you that you wouldn’t have met if it weren’t for your recovery.

Gratefulness As The Key To Success In Addiction Recovery

Better Long Term Outlook– When we are grateful, we are less likely to relapse into damaging behaviors. Someone who may be considering turning back to their addiction for comfort can focus on those things that they are grateful for in order to realize that that is not a path to which they wish to return. Your positive attitude ends up helping others who are just starting their recovery journey, and in turn becomes a gift to many. When a patient switches from an addictive opioid to successful buprenorphine treatment, the addictive behavior often stops.

Being thankful is a fundamental part of the holiday season, but it’s also a big part of living a sober life in addiction recovery. Gratitude is not only an essential part of sober living during the holidays but all year long. In working the 12 steps, people in recovery learn the true meaning of gratitude as they experience a spiritual awakening in recovery and work to apply it to their everyday lives. Research has shown that practicing gratitude daily can have significant long-lasting positive effects on a person’s life.

How To Cultivate Gratitude And Reap The Rewards In Your Recovery

And while this is completely true, what we can control is our thoughts. We can make them positive and grateful or negative and toxic. When we begin thinking negative thoughts or finding something wrong with a person or situation, these thoughts grow. Have you ever become annoyed or frustrated by a person or something they’ve done? But what happens for most is when we start to think those judgemental and negative thoughts we think of more things about the person or situation we don’t like. The thoughts can snowball until we’ve worked ourselves into a state of restlessness and discontent.

  • A number of studies have investigated the role of gratitude in relationships in different situations.
  • Research has shown that practicing gratitude is tied to greater overall happiness.
  • When challenges arise, a positive mind set helps a person to see them as opportunities for growth, rather than obstacles to hide from or to fight against.
  • They view their current situation as unsatisfactory, and they might not have much hope that things will improve in the future.
  • Optimism has been shown to change your frame of mind from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

Optimism has been shown to change your frame of mind from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. People with a growth mindset believe that overcoming challenges and learning is achieved through dedication and hardwork. This can motivate addicts to work through their recovery program more effectively, even when faced with significant hurdles. For example, rather than viewing relapse as a form of failure, you can see it as a chance to inform your recovery and rework your program.

How To Experience More Gratitude In Your Life

Imagine all the positive people, places, and things you’ll notice and appreciate. Studies confirm that stress, depression, anxiety and isolation are dangerous triggers to relapse. Regular practice of gratitude by those in recovery has been shown to lessen negative emotions and increase coping skills, decreasing the rate of relapse, and supporting long-term recovery. If we are grateful for being sober, it is more likely we will stay that way. We will focus more on being thankful for those that helped us and less on the negatives.

With a grateful mindset, you have the opportunity to lead a happy and fulfilling life free from addiction. Rita also trains clients in self-help, empowerment and spiritual growth techniques so that they can continue to learn and grow long after therapy ends. The benefits of gratitude might sound very nice but what if you don’t feel very grateful? People typically seek help for addiction at a low point in their lives. No one decides that life is going so great that they want to put everything on hold to get treatment for a substance use issue. What’s more, many of the studies cited above measure trait gratitude, or the amount of gratitude you’re naturally inclined to feel without really thinking about it.

One of the benefits of cultivating a grateful heart in recovery is that it helps you better handle the negative things that come your way. Gratitude becomes like a sweet salve that not only heals but also contributes to your sense of joy for breaking free from substance use. When people are grateful for what they have, they will experience a great deal of happiness. We must never forget the struggle and horrors of our active addiction.

You will find that it strengthens your resolve to stay clean and sober. How many times in your life has someone held the door open for you in a public place? It is simple things like this that can help us to cultivate the right attitude for feeling grateful. There are simple joys in life that we need to be more mindful of every day.

Practice This Gratitude Meditation:*

When we worry about relapse or feel resentment or other negative feelings creep in, it’s a great opportunity to cultivate gratitude. During active addiction, we may have taken friends and family for granted or overlooked the simple pleasures in life. And when we looked for the worst qualities in every situation, we created a self-fulfilling prophecy of negativity. RecoveryGo virtual outpatient addiction and mental health treatment directly to you. We’re much more likely to treat the people in our lives with kindness and patience, because we become keenly aware of what we have to lose. For instance, let’s say you notice how poorly a 12-step meeting was run and organized.

Write down a list of the people and experiences that have enriched your life in some way. If you take the time to really think about the good things in your life, you’ll always have something to write. At Cycles of Change Recovery Services, it’s all about treating the mind, body and spirit. Angus is a writer from Atlanta, GA, who writes about behavioral health, substance use disorders and addiction treatment, and mindfulness practices like yoga, tai chi, and meditation.

You cannot truly be grateful toward others is you do not thank yourself for caring for yourself, seeking help when you needed it, learning to trust others. Research has shown that people who practice gratitude have lower levels of stress, less depression, and manage adversity better. All of these psychological benefits are bound to have a positive effect on your health. People who are grateful tend to sleep better, and studies show that gratitude can boost your immunity and decrease the risk of disease. People feel and express gratitude in various ways, but the intention remains the same — to share appreciation and thanks for the positive things in life.

You may have noticed that the benefits of gratitude described above are related in various ways. For example, gratitude reduces stress and helps you sleep, which improves your physical health. It also improves your relationships, which reduces your stress and increases your positive emotions. However you look at it, gratitude is an important node in a complex web of benefits. The spiritual aspect of recovery is a little harder to pin down.

Gratitude Is Good For Your Physical And Mental Health

One way is to begin journaling about the things in your life that you are grateful for right now. While we can look at each one of these things and find an issue, the power is in finding the good in each. Practicing gratitude may seem easy to some but daunting to others. For many, our brains have been wired and become accustomed to thinking one way—often negative. Those with addiction issues, sometimes have maladjusted ways of thinking which become habits. These thoughts, as mentioned, can tend to be negative, always seeing what is wrong and what we don’t want. When we are optimistic we see good outcomes in even the most trying situations.

But studies show that showing gratitude can do a lot for yourmoodand even your overall health. People who experience and practice gratitude regularly report increased levels of everything we list. It doesn’t mean gratitude is the sole causal factor, but it does mean that compared to people who don’t practice or experience gratitude regularly, people who do experience those benefits. As we recovered, we began to connect with a higher power and allow that power to replace ourselves as the guiding force in our lives. We began to learn that this power wanted us to experience happiness and joyfulness as the direct result of being of service to others.

  • You might want to set an alarm on your phone to remind yourself to take “gratitude” breaks throughout the day.
  • This will not only help you calm your mind but also find things to be grateful for you may overlook.
  • This applies whether you’re volunteering to help others, doing things that make your friends and family happy, or working in a way that contributes to your community and surroundings.
  • Having trouble focusing your gratitude onto a specific person, place or thing?

You can get desensitized to gratitude like everything else and doing the practice once a week can keep it fresh. Pick one night, perhaps Sunday, and write in detail about three things that you were grateful https://ecosoberhouse.com/ for that week. One group was asked to write about things they were grateful for that had occurred during the past week. The second group was asked to write about things that annoyed them that week.

However, if you find that you’re always having a hard time, perhaps shifting your perspective can help. You can change your outlook on life and you might notice that things will change.

Regardless of how dependence begins, once it has developed, it is considered a disease that must be medically treated. If you or a loved one need help with addiction, call us today. A private and convenient solution when you are seeking addiction help for yourself or a loved one. Calls are Free, Confidential, and with absolutely No Obligation. Buprenorphine is an opioid medication used to treat opioid addiction in the privacy of a physician’s office.

The tendency to feel grateful is a mental attitude that can be developed. It is particularly important that people recovering from an addiction try to cultivate this positive outlook, because it can help to ensure their success in the future. Keeping a gratitude journal is one of the easiest ways to establish and maintain an attitude of gratitude all of the time. This can be a journal that you write in at the very start of your day or one that you work on just before going to sleep.

If you feed your recovery happy, grateful thoughts, you’re more likely to improve rapidly. It The Importance of Gratitude in Recovery is unclear why the exercise did not lead to increased gratitude as the authors hypothesized.

The group that wrote gratitude letters reported better mental health at four weeks and 12 weeks after the writing assignment ended, compared to the other two groups. This suggests that a gratitude practice can be a valuable addition to your treatment plan. Addiction – particularly substance addiction, in which the chemical makeup of your brain gets disrupted – is inherently negative in nature. It provokes negative feelings of anger, anxiety, pain, depression, and low self-worth.

For example, you can spend time with friends, go swimming, go for hikes, go see your favorite movies, get a massage, or anything else that makes you happy. Here, it’s always good if you have hobbies that you truly enjoy, and if you don’t, you can always work on developing some. Taking time out from your busy life will give you perspective, time to take stock and see what you have, and room to enjoy your life.

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